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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Being a Business

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, August 3, 2011

Or: Dash It All, I Don’t Want To Be a Business! Pt. 1

Hello, lovelies. Welcome to my rant in two parts. The first part, you can read below. The second part will appear on my own blog, Court Can Write, sometime in the next week or two. Addendumish link to follow once Pt. 2 goes live.

Laughing at the idea of me as a business.

So. Onward, tally-ho, and all that rot. Today’s rant is brought to you by my most recent realization: namely, that I don’t want to be a business.

“Huh?” you say. “What do you mean, a business? I thought you were a writer?”

*sigh* So did I, my darlings. So did I.

Do As I Say, Not As I Do

Some of you beautiful people regularly read me both here and at my blog, so I know some of you are familiar with my recent post How My Bachelors in Writing Didn’t Prepare Me for Writerhood. In that post, I say something that’s Very Important and which All Writers Must Live By:

Writing is a business.

And the writer is CEO, VP, treasurer, secretary, and go-fer.

And this is every writer. Not just the self-published ones.

Writers, we must learn to think of ourselves this way.

These four statements are all the truth.

And when I read them, a stubborn creature inside of me narrows her eyes, thins her lips, and speaks a firm, uncompromising “NO.”

O! cognitive dissonance! Indeed, “I spit my last breath at thee.”

Let’s Get This Out of the Way

For the last seven months, I have been thinking of myself as a business. You see, once upon a time, traditionally published writers could count on their traditional publishers to establish the writerly platform, promote the writerly activities, and leave chocolate mints on the writerly pillows. Nowadays, few writers get that kind of treatment, with the exception of the A-listers, and I’m sure I needn’t list them for you here. You know who they are.

Indie-published writers such as I have always needed to go it on their own, and self-published writers — well, the “self” part pretty much tells you who their marketing directors and CEOs are. If you haven’t the bombast of a legacy publisher behind you, you’ve gotta toot your own horn, and that’s just that.

Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining, and I am wholly head-over-heels for my indie publisher. I believe in my publisher’s ideals and business model, and I’m terribly excited to be part of the first steps into The Consortium’s brave new world.

But.

Being your own CEO, VP, treasurer, secretary, and go-fer is hard.

It takes time.

And it is time I would much rather spend writing.

Argument

Even Amanda Hocking, who has rocked the indie-publishing world with her flabbergasting e-sale, Kindle-type success, has remarked on how much the writing wanes when the business waxes. Her reasoning goes thusly:

“I want to be a writer. I do not want to spend 40 hours a week handling e-mails, formatting covers, finding editors, etc. Right now, being me is a full-time corporation.”

(Click here for the NY Times article.)

I wouldn’t say I’m to the full-time corporation point yet; I don’t have enough demands on my time to justify such a remark.

But I can see it coming.

And I don’t like it.

If I answered all incoming emails, Facebook messages, tweets, blog comments, and Google+ notifications every day, I would spend 3 solid hours at these tasks every single day. And I’m only talking Monday through Friday. That’s 15 hours a week.

(And I’m not even counting the time it takes me to craft three worthwhile blog posts every week. That’s another story. Or maybe it’ll come up in Pt. 2. We’ll see.)

In writing terms, 15 hours can be the equivalent of 7,500 – 10,000 words. Maybe even up to 15,000 in a good week.

According to these averages, I could be writing 40,000 more words per month. Instead, I’m being a business.

This is starting to become unacceptable.

When I post the continuation of this rant, I’ll come back and drop a few links here. In the meantime, that’s WILAWriTWe.

Do you feel like I do?

Photo by Julie V. Photography.

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On Backstory: Preschool

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, August 2, 2011

Yesterday I didn’t show up to work until after lunch. I was really dragging, too. I wandered down the row between offices and cubicles, waving a half-hearted response to my coworkers’ enthusiastic greetings.

I made my way to my desk, fell into my chair, and then started reading office email. It wasn’t terribly interesting. I’ve got a tedious training course coming up in a couple weeks. The International Machinists’ Union thinks I should consider joining up. And the Secretary of Transportation assures me this furlough nonsense is going to be cleared up any day now.

I spent a few minutes checking things off and deleting them, then looked up when someone started walking by my cubicle. My section head nodded a quick greeting to me, flashed a smile…and then stopped and looked at me with a puzzled expression.

“What are you doing here so late?”

The most honest answer would’ve been, “Falling asleep,” but I kept that to myself. I was exhausted, though. My Sunday had been a busy one, and it ran right on into my Monday with reckless disregard for my productivity.

See…Carlos and Julie were in town this weekend. They came down from Topeka, and whenever they do that we all end up getting way too little sleep because we want to make the absolute most of the time we’ve got together. Never fails.

We did a little bit of that last Friday night, when we went downtown with Courtney following her covershoot for Shadows after Midnight. That kept us out until after midnight.

But Sunday we got together again. We met up for lunch at P. F. Chang’s, then spent the afternoon with Sean Sanders, Consortium Programmer, while he showed off the tireless work he’s been doing to get their photography website up and running.

Then when that was done we headed downtown again, this time with the lovely Karen Thrall, the model we use for Katie on my Ghost Targets covers. We headed to an almost-deserted parking garage downtown, picked a corner with some construction junk left lying around, and proceeded to make an utterly badass cover photo.

Our shoot was only slightly inconvenienced by the late arrival of some surly security guards, but we pointed Karen at them and they kinda forgot what they were supposed to be doing. We got out of there with some excellent photos, and a pretty fun story to boot.

Then we came back to the house and Julie and Courtney went off for some girl talk while Carlos and I sat around and talked business. And dreams. And changing the world. And advanced, next-generation green-screen software to bring the indie movie industry up to speed with Kindle publishing.

Believe it or not, that conversation kept me up past two in the morning on a school night. Monday the Velezes were heading home, so it was only reluctantly that they finally took their leave, and I went into my bedroom to crash for a few hours.

But none of that is why I showed up late to work yesterday. I fell into my bed at 2:30, and I was up again at 7:00, because I had an important appointment.

I took my little girl to her first day at school.

We got there a little bit early, and we stayed a little bit late. She was scared. She wrapped her arms around me, while all the other kids in her class played with blocks or checked out books or colored princesses.

She shook her head whenever I tried to talk to her and answered me in the tiniest little whisper I’ve ever heard. Her eyes were wide and shiny, her lip was trembling, and she couldn’t even find her voice to say how scared she was.

Leaving her there was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. Her brilliant teacher came over with a kind word and a question about her pretty pink boots, and got her distracted so I could slip away. But I spent the whole rest of my morning worrying and missing her.

So when I finally got to work, when my boss asked me what I was doing in so late, I just shrugged one shoulder and said, “Rough morning.”

He chuckled, and nodded, and said, “I’ve had a few of those. Good weekend, huh?”

Yeah. Great weekend with friends, and a rough Monday morning after. I’ve had a few of those myself, but never one like this.

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On Superhero Fantasy: Creating a Genre

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, July 29, 2011

On Tuesday I talked about my fantasy problem, and the project proposal that solved it. The core of that project proposal involved taking comic book conventions and transplanting them into traditional fantasy novels.

I’ve been thinking about that old project a lot lately, and one day it occurred to me that I’ve got a Director of Marketing these days who’s a huge comic book nerd, and he’d never heard the story. I had never even mentioned the premise to him.

So I shared it with Joshua the other day. We were chatting online and I said, “Did I ever tell you about my old Fantasy Justice League story?” He was immediately intrigued (naturally), but before I got too far into the story I got called away from the conversation. I suggested we could pick it up again when we got together for Social Writing the following night.

That left Joshua with 36 hours to mull the concept of a Fantasy Justice League. So Saturday night I was sitting in the bookstore/coffee shop, chatting with some of the other writers who’d shown up early, then Joshua arrived, grabbed a seat right next to me, and said, “Okay. Tell me more.”

I dove in, describing the premise, the characters, some of the stories we wanted to tell….

And he kept trying to tie them back to actual Justice League characters. It probably could have been done, but I don’t know a thing about the Justice League. It took me three days to remember that our catburglar character was explicitly based on Catwoman!

But no, for the most part Dan and I weren’t trying to recreate existing superheroes. We were trying to take traditional fantasy characters and elevate them to superhero status by their antics. But from the moment I first said “Fantasy Justice League,” Joshua had been working on building a much truer representation than I’d imagined.

So by the time I ran out of description for my project, he started describing his. He had a stand-in for Superman ready to go, and good ideas for Batman, and there were half a dozen others who barely needed any adaptation at all.

That might sound like there would be intellectual-property concerns (and the big comic publishers are known for being a litigious bunch), but superheroes have never been a terribly original crowd. They’re all archetypes, and making a genuine transition to a unique fantasy setting (with all the character tweaks that entails) should be more than enough to clear the “transformative” hurdle.

But the interesting thing was to see how effectively the concept of “superhero fantasy” resounded for both of us, and how distinctive the end results looked. Either project would sound like “superhero fantasy,” but even with the eventual Justice League gimmick thrown in there for both of them (that is to say, a large band of the “superhero” types ends up joining forces), the two projects would produce very different end results.

There’s an awful lot to learn there, for new writers. I know a lot of writers get really excited (or anxious) about coming up with the perfect “story idea.” I know writers who are terrified of sharing their “story idea” for fear someone will steal it.

But when it comes right down to it, stories don’t live or die on the ideas. They live or die on the telling. “Fantasy Justice League” is an undeniably cool story idea, but it’s not a novel. It’s a genre. Joshua can tell his version of the story and I can tell mine.

If it takes off, it could become the next “nicey-nice vampires” — a new fad genre bursting into popularity. In the next year we could see a thousand different renderings of “Fantasy Justice League.” Some would be fascinating. Some would be terrible. Some would barely fit within the genre. Some would be direct ripoffs of other stories.

But the cool thing about it is that each one would be its own thing. The magic of writing is that there’s only a handful of actual stories, but there’s no limit to the number of tellings. There’s always room for another voice, another perspective, another twist.

Watch for some superhero fantasy from the Consortium. Maybe we’ll be ground zero for the Next Big Thing. Or if you find it happening elsewhere, be sure and let me know. If nothing else, we’ve got a couple projects to contribute to the flood.

And in the meantime, write your stories. Don’t hoard up your ideas, don’t wait for something new, just tell the story that’s interesting to you at the moment. Everything else flows from that.

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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Agatha Christie

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Today, dear inklings, I’m going to tell you stuff about writing that goes hand-in-hand with what I told you last week. It’s stuff that contradicts much of what I believe concerning Good Writing.

Forgive me if this elicits any dissociative episodes; alas, I can but follow where the Muse* guideth.

I’ve spent the last few days getting scared out of my wits by a wholly unexpected source: Agatha Christie’s And Then There Were None.

I read this novel twice during my high school years; and even though I never forgot the premise, the plot, or the twist, I always knew I would read it at least one more time. Something about this story has always drawn me. It’s probably the first murder mystery I ever read. And it’s a doozy.

I said “doozy.” *gigglesnort*

*ahem*

So, when I picked up the novel over the weekend, I did so knowing full well the whodunit outcome. Knowing the story as I did, there was no mystery to the murder. The only thing I couldn’t remember was the sequence of who was killed when and where and with what.

Also, there were adverbs.

ADVERBS.

But in spite of the lack of mystery, in spite of the plethora of adverbs, and, yea verily, in spite of an omniscient narrator who spent bonkers too much time in characters’ heads…

…I still enjoyed the re-read, and it spooked me enough to give me goosebumps and walk around the house with all the lights on after sundown.

The Conundrum

…is that I’m not entirely sure how Ms. Christie did it. AHA! There’s the real mystery! Not the whodunit but the howdunit. And I don’t have any answers that are helpful to me, much less to any of you.

I just know it’s a crazy good story. But since we’re supposed to be learning something here, I’ll put my detective skills to the test.

Solving the Mystery

Character development! Maybe that’s it. The omniscient narrator lets the reader see who these people really are, as well as who they’re pretending to be even to themselves. That’s a pretty significant point, I guess — though omniscient will never be my favorite narration style.

Ugh for omniscient, really.

But still, it is fascinating to be in these characters’ heads and watch them start to interact. The reader sees them thinking one thing and saying another. If nothing else, this is quite the realistic study of the human condition. Kudos to Ms. Christie for that, most assuredly.

Realistic. Yes, that’s another point this story has in its favor. All the details are there: sights, sounds, smells, tactile sensations. The reader gets them from every character: more, from the characters who are more sensual; less, from those who are more practical; but still, every character offers them.

(Forgive the crudity of my punctuation; I haven’t had time to build it to scale**.)

Oh! Especially character Vera Claythorne. There’s a terrible, morbid attraction in watching her succumb to ***SPOILER!!!*** suicidal thoughts due, in great part, to the simple smell of the ocean.

My final clue in the howdunit is Christie’s use of italics and capitals. She emphasizes certain phrases in such a way that I can’t help but hear horrible violins punctuating every syllable — in the best thriller-film tradition. Here are some of my favorites:

(WARNING: ***SPOILERS!!!***)

Vera cried out, “Who was that speaking? …”

“…Ulick Norman Owen — Una Nancy Owen — each time, that is to say, U. N. Owen. Or by a slight stretch of fancy, UNKNOWN!”

“It’s the wife, doctor. I can’t get her to wake. My God! I can’t get her to wake…”

“There are five of us here in this room. One of us is a murderer…”

“There’s one other little fact. A pane in the dining-room window has been smashed — and there are only three little Indian boys on the table.”

I know they’re not terribly creepy out-of-context, but I hope they at least hint at why this novel chilled my spine.

Ms. Christie — in the Novel — with the Adverb

Christie uses adverbs. They’re everywhere. Like cockroaches.

Disparagingly. With active malevolence. Hospitably. Persuasively. Sharply. Doubtfully. Fantastically.

And that’s just two (2) pages’ worth.

If you’ve been paying attention — and I know you have, my sweet inklings, because that’s just the dear sort of people you are — you know that I’m not overly fond of adverbs.

Obviously, I use them sometimes. ; )

But I do try to stay away from them at least in dialogue tags.

Those adverbs of Christie’s I mentioned? All but two of them are attached to dialogue.

I am not a fan of this.

That said…Christie’s adverbs didn’t bother me so much. Maybe because my brain was already softened pre-conditioned by my enjoyment of Feist’s adverb-riddled high fantasy story. Or maybe I’m suffering early onset of dementia.

Either possibility is likely.

At any rate, Christie’s adverbs — in the midst of a clever, character-driven, suspense-filled tale — hardly distracted me from the story at all.

I don’t know why they didn’t. Except for the clever, suspenseful character stuff.

Loose Ends

So, I guess the only thing I really learned about writing this week is that it’s still possible to give me chills, even when I know what to expect. This says more about me than it does about writing, but you people can’t have everything, y’know.

😉

*The Muse, in case I’ve never mentioned it here, is a chain-smoking, bar-dwelling pervert named Clarence who shows up in connection with my Grace and Jack stories, for those of you who’ve read some of those.

**Please, somebody tell me you get this reference. I’d like to feel not-old.

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On Superhero Fantasy: My Fantasy Problem

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, July 26, 2011

A long time ago, my friend Dan and I got together to brainstorm a fantasy series. We did it for a handful of reasons (most of which weren’t mentioned in that article). I saw an opportunity to work on an exciting new writing project with an old friend. Dan saw an opportunity to fix my fantasy problem.

The heart of the issue (and we both recognized it) was that eight years of working a day job and watching my dreams die had robbed me of the sense of grand adventure that makes fantasy novels work. I couldn’t write what I didn’t believe in, and that left me writing dreary realism even in the scant time I actually spent writing books.

Dan saw all that, and he knew what I needed. I needed to write big fantasy, to get my nerve back and get back in the game. So he came over (as I described in that first link above), and he proposed a universe and a basic theme for our character and story design.

The theme was “superheroes.” He wanted to write superhero fantasy.

When I offered that phrase at Consortium Time last night, Courtney said, “Wait, aren’t superheroes already fantasy?” Joshua wasn’t around to quibble, so I gave my answer.

“It doesn’t matter.” The point is that we’re taking the conventions of superheroes and transplanting them into a distinctly fantasy story. Dan’s original suggestion was that we take a traditional sword-and-sorcery setting (Renaissance Europe with magic), a cast of traditional sword-and-sorcery characters (the warrior, the lovable rogue, the snooty wizard, the damsel in distress), and we have those characters behave the way comic-book superheroes do.

That means we end up with a big cast of superheroes and supervillains (of varying powers and importance). We end up with intensely powerful characters (and don’t apologize for it), and we wrap them up in all kinds of targeted branding (think costume and accoutrements). We end up with legendary names directly associated with clear ideals. We end up with mortal enemies (who never really die).

And, of course, we end up with epic battles. We end up with big fantasy.

That all started three or four years ago now, and not much has come of it. We have ten- or twenty-thousand words of notes in Google Docs, I’ve got a handful of half-finished short stories introducing some of the characters, and we have plots for eight novels that may never get written.

It doesn’t matter. It worked anyway. We ran into scheduling problems getting actual pages written, and I finally gave up and started into my own projects again, and (would you believe it?) everything I wrote started getting bigger. Just thinking like that had improved my style. Several years later, here I am watching my sales numbers on Taming Fire climb and climb.

That’s the same fantasy novel that broke  my heart a decade ago. That’s the one I wrote, presented to a class full of rational-types, and decided it was too over-the-top and what-was-I-doing-with-my-life? I went back to it in May for the rewrite, and wrote it bigger. I added magic. I added battles. I added a supervillain or two.

Dan’s plan worked for me. If not for that failed project, I probably wouldn’t be seeing the success I am today. Thanks, Dan.

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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Raymond E. Feist

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, July 20, 2011

If you’ve been paying close attention, my dear inklings, you know that I’ve recently moved. What you might not know is that during the past week, I finally got all the books unpacked and shelved.

OH HAPPY DAY. 😀

Well, I’ve shelved all the ones I’m keeping. In a masterful show of determination and strength of will, I sorted out three whole boxes of books that need a new home. At present, they await the husband’s check-through and approval, as I was helpful enough to sort out quite a few of his books, too. Tee hee.

So, in my sorting, I found two books that came with us from my To-Read Shelf. Rather than return them to said shelf, I chose to read them instead. These were Magician: Apprentice and Magician: Master, the first two books in The Riftwar Saga by Raymond E. Feist.

Rediscovery

I first read these two novels when I was sixteen or seventeen. Back then, most of my speculative fiction reads were sci-fi, thanks to my dad. The library at Cambrai Fritsch Kaserne (the American Army base) had a paperback exchange program, so he was always coming home with Niven, Asimov, and (most especially) Heinlein. I devoured them all, so when he showed up with Feist’s two Riftwar novels, I plunged into those, too.

Magic. Adventure. A youthful main character I could still relate to, only just out of childhood myself — and then look up to as he developed into a character of strength and integrity. More adventure. Cross-dimensional travel. Bizarre, colorful cultures — terribly appealing to a teen growing up “multi-culti” herself. Oh, and of course there was romance, too. Not enough to make me blush, but still. ; )

Feist’s novels had everything a budding fantasy fan could hope for…but strangely enough, I never re-read them until now. I never forgot them, though, and I always knew I would read them again one day. I only hoped that after the passage of time, I would enjoy them as much as I did at first read.

Disappointment?

Dearest readers, I’ll be blunt: As I finished up my re-read of Magician: Apprentice Chapter One, I wondered if I was going to be able to finish the book.

The main character, Pug, felt disconnected even from his own action. The setting descriptions seemed like cardboard backdrops. There was telling instead of showing. POV swiched from one character to the next mid-scene. The narrator was both omniscient and limited, depending on the paragraph. “Said” was the rarest of the dialogue tags. And there were adverbs.

Adverbs.

To my dismay, these sadnesses weren’t limited to Chapter One; nay, they continued as I got farther along in the story. My heart was broken. The magic was gone. “I used to think this was good?” thought I as I read.

But.

I recalled two things I knew for certain:

One, Magician: Apprentice was Feist’s first novel — and I know what it’s like to publish a first novel. I know what goes into it, and I know what the author wants to take out of it after the book has been published.

(One-point-five, I will have a lot more control over what my first novel does than Feist ever had or will have over his, because my first novel was indie-published and his wasn’t. This makes me sad for traditionally published authors and angry at the traditional publishing institution.)

Two, I knew there was magic in here. Gone? Maybe. But if there was any shred of magic left for me to find, by all the gods of Midkemia I was going to find it.

Discovery

I found it.

It wasn’t actually that hard, once I got over myself.

All the things I once loved about Feist’s novels were still there: the magic, the main character who got into my heart, the crazy adventures, the cool cross-dimensional stuff, the awesome world-building, and, yes, the romance. None of it was missing. None of it had disappeared.

It was all just buried under my pickiness. It was all buried under my forgetfulness.

What had I forgotten?

I’d forgotten how to sit back, relax, and just enjoy a good yarn.

Salvation

Feist didn’t write this story so that I could pick it apart. He wrote this story to entertain. He says so himself in his foreword. He wrote the Riftwar novels intending to write a story that he would enjoy reading.

He wrote this story for readers. I was reading it as a writer — and when I read that way, I can become hypercritical to the point of no longer seeing the magic at all. Yes, it is possible to pick apart even the best fantasy story and turn it into dry academia.

Feist reminds me of how to read like a kid again. He reminds me to let the magic wash over me and transport me.

And that’s all a good story really needs to do.

And that’s WILAWriTWe.

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On Bookselling: Targeting Your Market

By Aaron Pogue on Friday, July 15, 2011

This week I’m talking about turning Kindle-published books into bestsellers. I’ve done it, and I’m sharing some secrets to how you can, too.

Essentially, they boil down to this:

Get really lucky, and watch in astonishment as your numbers start to climb.

Of course, if I really felt that way, I wouldn’t be writing this blog at all, let alone this series. Yes, the e-book market is erratic, but that doesn’t mean we’re totally in the dark.

O, Glorious Amazon!

The fact of the matter is that Amazon.com is the most powerful tool indie writers have ever seen. Probably the most powerful tool any writers have ever seen, given the amount of rewards they offer.

The last three decades have seen a major dwindling in the always-slim amount of resources publishers have spent on marketing books. It’s become the author’s responsibility to establish a platform, tour and promote, and generate sales. That’s been a punishing trend for writers.

But then Amazon came along and became a major promotional force for writers. Amazon wants to sell books to readers. Amazon doesn’t much care about promoting this publishing house or that author brand. They just want to find the actual title a given reader will buy, and put the opportunity in front of him.

That has been huge for self-published writers. I’ve sold over a thousand copies of Taming Fire now, and that’s because Amazon has been advertising the book to many more thousands of readers.

There’s no way I could have afforded to pay for that kind of advertising, and there’s certainly no way I could have targeted it as narrowly as Amazon did. But Amazon put my book in front of the readers who were most likely to want to buy it.

And as I said yesterday, with Taming Fire I did everything necessary to make sure that, once those readers saw the book, they recognized it as one they wanted.

The Fumble

And that brings me back to the questions I was asking yesterday: What did I do right with Taming Fire, that I did wrong with Gods Tomorrow? Some of it may be inscrutable. Some of it may be pretty boring (I spent ten months polishing my promotional process between the time I released one and the other). But when it comes to the things I described above, I made a pretty obvious fumble with this one.

First…it’s a hybrid novel.

  • It’s science fiction, but it’s near-future and takes all the whiz-bang technology for granted, instead of playing it up in big ways.
  • It’s a mystery, but I spend a lot less time in crime labs and deep introspection than I do in chase scenes and conversations.
  • It’s a thriller, but only after Katie solves the puzzling mystery. The really exciting action doesn’t start until about halfway through the book (and nobody actually gets shot until the very end).

There’s nothing wrong with any of those things. Science fiction is usually more of a setting than a story type. Mystery/thriller hybrids are popular. And Gods Tomorrow couldn’t really be anything other than what it is–and the people who do read it generally tend to like it.

Still, all of that complicates the sales message. Taming Fire is high fantasy. That’s all it is. Gods Tomorrow is a hybrid three layers deep, and it fell on me try to market that monstrosity when I had zero experience with that.

That made the cover a real challenge, but I’m thrilled with the cover we ended up with. It took some trying, but we got one that conveyed what the story is.

The biggest problem was the product description.

No, that’s not true. The biggest problem was the title. I’ve spent ten months now at war with myself over the title Gods Tomorrow. It’s brilliant…if you know what it means. For someone scanning over six little thumbnails in the “People who bought this book also liked…” row at Amazon, though, it’s usually going to give the wrong impression.

Then I realized last week, to my horror, that I had a paragraph on the first page of the book that not only complicated that confusion, but essentially established the wrong impression as Fact.

It was a clever little turn of phrase, but it made the whole book seem like it was definitely going to be some sort of Christian Fiction (and not even the sort of Christian Fiction that Christians would want to read).

The Fix

The beauty of digital publishing is that it’s cheap, easy, and fast to fix these sorts of mistakes. I discovered that problem on Monday night, and by Tuesday morning I’d corrected that paragraph in the prologue and uploaded the replacement to all my digital outlets.

But I also spent a lot of time thinking about the product description. Our Marketing Director Joshua was here a couple weeks ago telling you guys about writing strong descriptions, and I couldn’t help wondering how the lagging sales of Gods Tomorrow fit into that. So I went and reviewed what I had.

  • It described the setting.
  • It explained the story situation.
  • It introduced the characters.
  • And it said almost nothing about the plot.

That’s exactly the opposite of what Joshua recommended! So I dove back into it. I got Joshua’s help. We pulled in a couple outsiders to provide feedback and we tweaked it some. And here’s what we ended up with:

We abandoned privacy and turned databases into something like gods. They listened to our prayers. They met our needs and blessed us with new riches. They watched over us, protected us, and punished the wicked among us. We almost made a paradise.

But there were those who tried to hide from the databases’ all-seeing eye. They used their wealth or power or intellect to turn themselves into ghosts within the endless archive. For years these ghosts have used their anonymity to perpetrate atrocious crimes and slip away unscathed. And now someone among them may go further still. Someone wants to bring the system down.

The only thing that stands in his way is the FBI’s understaffed and overwhelmed Ghost Targets section. The agent on the case is their newest rookie, Special Agent Katie Pratt, and she’s in over her head. The first day on the job gives her an unsolvable murder that ultimately leads her to the greatest threat these gods have ever seen. Can one desperate woman prevent the downfall of her entire society?

That’s quite a bit different. It contextualizes the title and dives into the plot. Any0ne who bothers to read those hundred words will understand why the book is called Gods Tomorrow (and why the series is called “Ghost Targets”), they’ll know what kind of adventure they should expect (near-future science fiction, mystery turning into a thriller), and they can decide, quick and painless, if this is a book they would like to read.

And wouldn’t you know it, my sales have tripled in the few days since I made that change. The system works. You just have to do your part.

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On Bookselling: Looking for Trends

By Aaron Pogue on Thursday, July 14, 2011

So! I told you Tuesday about my meteoric rise to bestseller status at Amazon. I showed you a screenshot of Taming Fire contending with Robert Jordan and Brandon Sanderson for the rank of 82. I told you about the productivity-killing curse of ever-changing sales numbers, and that I was over and done with it.

I lied. I’ve watched very closely as Taming Fire climbed another 20 spots or so over the last couple days. Now I’m in contention with Patrick Rothfuss and the greatest fantasy novel of all time, The Name of the Wind. It’s a heady place to be.

Making Comparisons

I spend a lot of time talking about this to anyone who will listen. Among them is Joshua (who popped in for a couple guest posts a couple weeks ago). He’s got two Weird Westerns slated to go up in 2012, and he’s wondering what Taming Fire‘s sales numbers might mean for him. He’s thinking maybe he should write a fantasy novel.

Among them also is Courtney, whom you know quite well, and who already has a Christian fantasy novel available at Amazon. It’s not selling this much.

And, of course, there’s my other books. I’ve got Gods Tomorrow and Ghost Targets: Expectation in my sci-fi mystery thriller series, and the third book (Restraint) is due out in August. But it took Taming Fire about two weeks to eclipse all the sales, ever, of both those books combined.

I said on Tuesday that Taming Fire‘s success has been a little baffling. That’s primarily because of these comparisons. Why is Taming Fire selling so much more than Colors of Deception? Why is it selling so much more than Gods Tomorrow? Why isn’t its success generating sales of Gods Tomorrow?

If you’ve been writing long, you’ve probably heard the advice before: “You should never compare your success to that of other writers.” It’s oft-repeated and for good reasons. Writing (or for that matter any entertainment) is such a strangely uneven business that the only reasonable move for your sanity is to pick what counts as success for you, and work toward that.

If it’s getting your books read by a certain number of people, work toward that. If it’s making a certain amount of money, work toward that. If it’s changing the way the whole developed world views the value and production of art…well, you’ve got a lot of work ahead. Still, don’t waste time comparing yourself to Bono.

Trending

That irregularity becomes a real problem for a businessman, though. As a self-publisher, there’s an awful lot of learning and an awful lot of trial-and-error.

It’s a hugely competitive market, and we all want to do everything we can to stand out. We consider things like running banner ads for our books, going on a book tour (or a blog tour), doing interviews, printing off bookmarks, sending out flyers, participating in discussion boards, spamming Facebook and Twitter, redesigning our covers, reworking our product descriptions, choreographing book trailers, releasing podiobooks….

Any one of those could produce sales. Every one of those will take your time and focus away from writing new books. And that brings us to another bit of advice we’ve heard again and again: “If you want to be a writer in this day and age, you’ve got to be a businessman, too.”

We have to do some amount of self-promotion and sales and design, but how do we know what’s worth doing? How do we judge the return-on-investment?

That’s precisely what we’re asking at Consortium Books right now. That’s what I’m asking myself when I can’t fall asleep at night. What did I do right for Taming Fire that I did wrong for Gods Tomorrow? What can I do for Gods Tomorrow to make it catch up? Should I bother, or should I focus entirely on rushing out the sequel to Taming Fire instead?

The way a savvy businessman answers these questions is by looking at trends. And, as I’ve said, there are no trends. The data points look dangerously close to random.

One idea that’s been bandied about at Consortium Books Headquarters is that Taming Fire is selling so well because it’s a fantasy novel, and fantasy is such an active genre. Then again, Gods Tomorrow is a sci-fi mystery thriller, and all three of those are nearly as active as fantasy. But Gods Tomorrow is our poorest-performing title.

Meanwhile Colors of Deception sits in a relatively languid category at Christian Fantasy, but it sells four or five copies for every one I sell of Gods Tomorrow. See what I mean? The trends are worthless.

Targeting a Market

And yet, even in the heart of all that uncertainty, I’m willing to make one clear guess as to why this book has been, entirely on its own, so much more successful than our others. And the answer lies in the worst review my book has gotten (so far) at Amazon.com:

Aaron Pogue’s Taming Fire is your typical high fantasy. There’s the outcast hero; the smart, daring princess; the evil sorcerer; and DRAGONS! Daven is looking for a way to fit in this world where he is known only as the son of a thief. Then a mysterious magician recruits him to the school of magic to fight off the impending doom of dragons. Can Daven live up to the magician’s expectations and save the kingdom, or is he really a good for nothing?

I love the way Aaron has depicted the dragon in this book. It’s got strong writing and solid characters, but there’s not much to distinguish it from all the other fantasy books out there. I’d recommend it to anyone who wants to a quick read in a fantastical land.

3 stars.

— Jessie Sanders (my own editor, ladies and gentlemen), used without permission.

I really suspect Taming Fire is selling because it’s a fantasy novel. Not because fantasy is a busy genre, not because fantasy fans have some special predilection for e-readers, but because Taming Fire is just a fantasy novel. Jessie’s review spells it out clearly. If you go to Amazon.com looking for a fantasy novel and you stumble across Taming Fire, you’re going to know you’ve found one.

It’s in the cover art. It’s in the title (no matter what Joshua says). It’s in the product description. It’s in every page of the book.

The whole challenge for writers today is catching the attention of readers. It’s your job as a writer to tell an interesting story and tell it well. But it’s your job as marketer and promoter to catch the attention of the people who would like your book, and convince them to give it a chance.

That’s called targeting an audience. With Taming Fire it was easy. With Gods Tomorrow, I gave myself an uphill battle. Still, it can be done. I’ve spent the last week thinking hard about these things, and Gods Tomorrow has gone through three major changes in that time.

You really don’t have to write center-of-the-road genre fiction to be successful, but you can save yourself some trouble if you do a little bit of market targeting early on. Come back tomorrow, and I’ll talk about how.

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What I Learned About Writing This Week…from Dean Koontz. Again.

By Courtney Cantrell on Wednesday, July 13, 2011

This week’s WILAWriTWe is brought to you by my bookshelf that broke during the move.

Some poor soul had leaned it up against the side of the truck, that it might be loaded thereonto — when lo! behold! a gust of wind blew the bookshelf over, smashing it into smithereens upon the pavement!

Okay, okay, so it wasn’t as dramatic as all that. There were no smithers involved, een  or otherwise. The bookshelf fell over, and part of it broke. Ed and I proceeded to amuse our friends by shrugging with great nonchalance and saying (almost in unison), “Toss it in the Dumpster.”

So. We arrived at our new home minus one bookshelf. This necessitates my getting rid of some books. And as I’m sorting through them (20 boxes’ worth, if you must know), I come across Phantoms by Dean Koontz.

To Keep or Not To Keep?

I’ve read Phantoms two or three times (and, sadly, have seen the atrocious film version). I enjoyed the story, as well as Koontz’s writing — but I already knew I’m not likely to read it again. And if I do want to re-read it, there’s always the library or Kindle.

So. Into the give-away box went Phantoms.

To Write or Not to Write?

But before I turned my back on it, I flipped through it to the author’s afterword — and read the following:

“Writing Phantoms was one of the ten biggest mistakes of my life, ranking directly above that incident with the angry porcupines and the clown, about which I intend to say nothing more. Phantoms has been published in thirty-one languages and has been in print continuously for fifteen years, as I write this [in 2001]. Worldwide, it has sold almost six million copies in all editions. It has been well reviewed, and more than a few critics have called it a modern classic of its genre.

“…Yet it is this novel, more than any other, that earned for me the label of “horror writer,” which I never wanted, never embraced, and have ever since sought to shed.

“…I am a suspense writer. I am a novelist. I write love stories now and then, sometimes humorous fiction, sometimes tales of adventure… . But Phantoms fixed me with a spooky-guy label as surely as if it had been stitched to my forehead… .

“…[O]ne year after the hardcover bombed, Phantoms followed Whispers onto the paperback bestseller list…it sold and sold and sold… .

“…Do I like Phantoms? Yes. Do I wish I’d never written it? Yes. Am I happy to have written it? Yes. Am I a little schizo on this point? Yes. Although as a matter of career planning, Phantoms was a major strategic blunder, the writing of it brought me considerable pleasure, and readers’ outspoken delight in the book has provided a gratification that has sustained me through some bad days.

“The lesson, I suppose, is that beneficial developments can flow even from a mistake.”

~Dean Koontz

(emphasis added)

Beneficial Developments

People who never make mistakes also never live.

Writers who never make mistakes also never write.

So screw up, writer. Take the risk. Make a fool of yourself. Do something writerly that brings you considerable pleasure, even if people slap a label on you that you don’t want.

Don’t worry about the money. It’ll come, or it won’t. It’ll last, or it won’t.

Write the story that calls to you. Noli nothis permittere te terrere, and all that. Dance crazy in the moonlight, if it suits you. Follow the madness.

And above all, expect the beneficial developments. They’ll declare themselves in ways you can’t even imagine.

And that’s WILAWriTWe!

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On Bookselling: Distraction

By Aaron Pogue on Tuesday, July 12, 2011

This year I’ve missed a lot of blog posts. I missed some because I was so busy with school work. I missed some because I was so miserably sick. And I missed some because I was so frantic finishing up novels or promoting them to an oblivious public. I’ve had lots of good reasons to miss blog posts.

Last week I missed two. I gave you a pretty little story about my recent sickness (and mentioned that I was well), and then I promised two posts on the topic of selling your self-published books. And then I went silent. Those two posts are still coming, but I didn’t get around to writing them last week. And this time it was for a very bad reason.

I got distracted.

That’s it. Simple as that. The internet distracted me.

And it wasn’t even brilliant webcomics or hilarious cat videos or astonishingly addictive flash games that drew me away. It was a column of numbers that changed every few hours. I had a particular tab open, and every few minutes (sometimes seconds), whatever else I was supposed to be doing, I would click over to that tab and hit Refresh just to see if the numbers had changed.

Well…one number really. It was the number of copies of Taming Fire that I’d sold so far this month. It entranced me. As it climbed from one to two to three digits, it captivated me. It controlled my every waking moment. I couldn’t think about anything but, “How’s my book doing now?”

That’s a common problem for newly self-published authors. The sales reports and rankings really do update in real-time (or something very close to it), so it’s easy to see, minute-by-minute, whether or not you’ve sold any more copies.

But, then, I’m not a newly self-published author. I went through all this with Gods Tomorrow last October. And then I got over it. I quickly learned that the numbers really don’t change that quickly. You can drive yourself crazy checking to see if you’ve made another sale, and it’s irrationally disappointing to learn that the answer is no.

So I got over it. Probably by November, and it hasn’t been a problem since then. For several months I was only checking once a day (if that). When we released Courtney’s Colors of Deception it took off to a faster start than any of my books had for a while, so I got back into checking a couple times a day.

So why did I fall back into that trap with Taming Fire?

Because Taming Fire sold. And how! When I went back to that page a few minutes later to refresh and see if I’d sold any more books, chances were good I actually had!

Our company’s long-term goal is to average 50 sales per title per day. That means Gods Tomorrow should be selling two books an hour, and Ghost Targets: Expectation should be selling two books an hour, and Colors of Deception and Taming Fire and everything else we release.

But as I said, that’s long-term. We have to build an audience. We have to establish ourselves and get our names out there. We’ve been planing for 10 years and hoping for 3-5, to get our books selling 50 copies a day.

Yesterday Taming Fire sold 105 copies.

To my slight embarrassment it was mentioned on Twitter and Google+ last night that, during our weekly open-house work session for the Consortium, I was having a hard time getting any work done because I was too busy dancing.

This is why. As you can see in the picture up top, I’m currently rubbing shoulders with some of the biggest names in the industry. It’s a hell of a feeling.

And it’s utterly baffling. We certainly planned to build to these sales numbers (that’s the whole point), and every now and then we’d discuss the possibility of lightning bolts — of Tycho at Penny Arcade mentioning my book and setting off a landslide, or Radiohead hearing about our public domain principles and throwing a bunch of money at our cause — but there don’t seem to have been any lightning bolts.

I certainly haven’t done any brilliant marketing to sell these books. Carlos and I cooked up a pretty clever gimmick back in June, but the fact of the matter is that this trend was already in motion before we even got to implement that. Really everything I’ve done for Taming Fire I’ve also done for the last two books we released (after learning about it with Gods Tomorrow).

It’s chance. It’s luck. Luck will always play a role in publishing. But there are some other factors I think contributed. I’ll talk about those some on Thursday, and then on Friday we can finally follow up on a little promise Joshua made back when he graced us with some guest posts. So come back Thursday and I’ll tell you how digital bookselling works.

Well…I will if I can tear myself away from those numbers.

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